


I wouldn't mind

by Teatrolley



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Season/Series 03, i don't like grand sweeping gestures so this is a series of small but intimate ones, these two dorks are in love and in pain and able to mend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-01
Updated: 2015-06-01
Packaged: 2018-04-02 08:59:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4054237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teatrolley/pseuds/Teatrolley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Hi,” John says, rubbing his arm as if to wrap some warmth into it, and it all feels like Sherlock is being let in on some kind of secret. He catches a glimpse of his own reflection in the window, finds his own hair ruffled and sticking up everywhere, and wonders if John feels remotely the same way about Sherlock’s 3am look as Sherlock does about his. </p><p>“Difficulty sleeping?” John asks. </p><p>“Nocturnal.” </p><p>John shrugs and lets it go, like he would’ve refused to once upon a time, but he makes them both cups of tea and sits across from Sherlock for half an hour listening to Sherlock talk about the experiment, because he needs something to take his mind off things, and Sherlock doesn’t feel too bad about it.</p><p>_________________</p><p>John moves back into 221B, and through a series of small moments John and Sherlock manage to restore and rebuild the two of them, and they might even manage to create something new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I wouldn't mind

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Español available: [No me importaría](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4905625) by [lasobrina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lasobrina/pseuds/lasobrina)



> Wow, look, I did that thing again. The writing one. I have a grand love for the series-of-small-moments-trope apparently, so this is what you get. Unbeta'ed, but I think you'll survive, as always.

The day John comes back to Baker Street, they don’t talk about it. John puts his overnight bag filled with all his stuff on the living room floor, and Sherlock prepares him a cup of tea in silence. He doesn’t say, “Hello, it’s good to have you back, I’ve missed you, can we ever be the same again?” He doesn’t ask John how he is, or how long he’ll be staying, or if this is a good or a bad development in his eyes. Instead he hands him the cup of tea, and smiles softly when John murmurs a “Thank you.”

John’s old room looks as unused as it has been, and the first night, with the unpacked bag and sheet-less bed, it still feels temporary, but in the morning Sherlock wakes up to the sound of John using the shower, and he tries to ignore the way his heart aches with the relief of having him inside these four walls again. 

Sherlock waits with leaving his bed until he hears footsteps in the kitchen, and is rewarded with a piece of toast on a plate from John, like time has rewound years and they’re back to their first time together. He eats it at the kitchen table with his feet curled up under him, and studies John back in his dressing gown and pyjamas, like he hasn’t seen him in years. 

“Do you have any cases on?” John asks, and Sherlock checks, and an hour later they are off and running across London like old times, and it doesn’t feel like it used to, but it doesn’t feel too bad either. 

\--

They don’t happen every night, John’s nightmares, but they happen often, and Sherlock wakes every time, because his ears are sensitive, and because he wants to. Most of the time John will simply go back to sleep, but once, when Sherlock is working on an experiment in the kitchen, it seems he can’t, because he appears bleary-eyed and dishevelled in the kitchen doorway, rubbing the back of his neck. 

“Hey,” Sherlock greets him softly. The clock on the wall tells him it’s nearly 3am, and the flat is cast in shadows and the relative silence of London night-time, and it feels intimate to see John like this.

“Hi,” John says, rubbing his arm as if to wrap some warmth into it, and it all feels like Sherlock is being let in on some kind of secret. He catches a glimpse of his own reflection in the window, finds his own hair ruffled and sticking up everywhere, and wonders if John feels remotely the same way about Sherlock’s 3am look as Sherlock does about his. 

“Difficulty sleeping?” John asks. 

“Nocturnal.” 

John shrugs and lets it go, like he would’ve refused to once upon a time, but he makes them both cups of tea and sits across from Sherlock for half an hour listening to Sherlock talk about the experiment, because he needs something to take his mind off things, and Sherlock doesn’t feel too bad about it. 

\--

“Do you think Mrs Hudson would allow me to paint my room?” John asks a week or so later over their Chinese take-away dinner. 

“New start,” he says, when Sherlock asks why, and the next day Sherlock pays Mrs Hudson a visit and asks for her permission, which he gets, after receiving a soft pat on the cheek. 

“You’ll be fine, the two of you,” she says, and Sherlock pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about, but that afternoon he leaves a paint catalogue on the kitchen table for John to flip through. 

John goes with a dark shade of blue, and they spend a weekend painting over the white walls and adding some new colours, resulting in them being covered nearly permanently in blue, but when John giggles at the paint in Sherlock’s hair, he decides he doesn’t mind. 

John still has nightmares, and things are still different and hard, but while they might never get back to where they were, the new room stands as a reminder that they can always build something new. That night John sleeps on the couch to avoid the fumes, so Sherlock more or less accidentally plays him to sleep on the violin, and it doesn’t go unnoticed by him how John doesn’t wake up screaming from a nightmare that night.

\--

A few weeks later Sherlock is sprawled on the couch when John enters the room, and settles himself, not in his chair, but on the end of the couch containing Sherlock’s feet, which he places in his lap. 

“Okay?” he asks, and Sherlock’s heart beats faster with the way John’s fingers rest around his naked ankle. 

“Okay,” he agrees, and pretends to return his attention to his laptop. John doesn’t remove his hand. 

\--

Next time John appears in the kitchen after a nightmare, Sherlock musters up the courage to ask him if he’s okay. 

“Most of the time,” John says. “I will be,” and Sherlock is surprised and happy with how open and honest the reply is. 

“What do you dream about, on nights like these?” he asks, and fully expects John to shut him down, but he doesn’t, of course he doesn’t. 

“It depends. Mostly you,” John says, and Sherlock twitches.

“Am I that scary?” he tries, but John huffs out a shallow breath and puts his hand on Sherlock’s wrist shortly, saying, “Not like that. I dream about the jump, or the bullet, most of the time.” None of that makes Sherlock feel any better. 

“I’m sorry I asked,” he mumbles. 

“I’m sorry the truth is this horrible,” John replies, and he holds the end of Sherlock’s shirtsleeve between his forefinger and thumb. 

“Do you think we’ll ever be fine again?” Sherlock asks, but doesn’t look at John, but at the place where their skin is almost touching. 

“We are fine,” John says, and turns his hand so his palm fits over the back of Sherlock’s hand. “And we’ll grow finer with time, probably.” 

It’s an attempt at a light-hearted joke, so Sherlock laughs and hopes that John is right. John studies him with an expression Sherlock can’t quite place, and a small smile on his lips. 

“Can I hug you?” John asks, and being squeezed by John feels a little like Sherlock’s heart is mending.

\--

Christmas rolls around, and with the smell of baked goods and the warmth of the fire warming the flat, it starts to feel like a real home again. Outside it’s freezing, but John’s smiles and looks and laughs get warmer, so the cold doesn’t touch Sherlock one bit. 

Sherlock’s parents visit them, and John sits on the couch next to Sherlock and touches his knee, and Sherlock tries not to blush when his mom smiles fondly at the two of them. 

John talks to Sherlock about the cactus that he bought for his bedside table and named, and Sherlock should really hate it, but he doesn’t. He smiles when John jokes about being able to keep it alive for this long, and says “Well, you’re keeping me alive,” and he meant with teas and toasts and cases, but when he realizes the heavier meaning behind those words, he thinks he means that, too. 

“This was a good evening,” John says, later, when everyone has left. He looks close to nodding off, sitting cross-legged on the couch. Sherlock stretches his legs out on the coffee table and agrees. John tugs at one of Sherlock curls, mumbling, “Your hair used to be so long,” and it feels natural when he leaves his hand resting on top of Sherlock’s head. 

“I love you, you know,” he says softly, and Sherlock doesn’t reply, but he leans into the touch and closes his eyes, and he knows John understands. 

\--

Later John is brushing his teeth in the toilet, when Sherlock stops on the other side of the bathroom door and rests his hand against the wooden frame. 

“John?” he asks, and the noises from inside the bathroom stop. 

“Yeah?”

“I love you, too. In case that wasn’t clear.” 

For a moment there’s silence, but then John says, “I know. Thank you, though,” and it’s the correct response, because John’s always is. 

\--

During winter two things happen: Sherlock accidentally sets the kitchen on fire, and John yells at him for it, and they talk about Magnussen. 

He has an explanation for the fire, really, he does, but John seems not to want to hear it. They end up yelling at each other for a good five minutes, but none of it is venomous, and that in itself is enough to make something like thrill rise in Sherlock’s chest. 

“You’re such an idiot,” John says, and his face has black streaks on it from where he’s been wiping his hand over his forehead. Sherlock wets a towel and hands it to John, gesturing wordlessly at his face. John wipes it, looks at the black imprint on the towel, and laughs. When he looks back up, his eyes are filled with fondness, and when he throws the towel in Sherlock’s face and says, “I hate you,” Sherlock knows he means the opposite, and it feels a lot like progress. 

The other thing happens when John, once again, wakes up screaming from a nightmare. This time Sherlock is in his bed and is awoken by it. He makes to get out of it, but is interrupted when John’s footsteps continue down the hallway to his door and there’s a small knock. 

“Sherlock?” John’s voice sounds. 

“Yeah?”

The door opens slightly, and Sherlock raises himself against the headboard and says yes when John asks if this is okay, before he sits cross-legged on the end of Sherlock’s bed. 

“Did I wake you?” John asks, and Sherlock says yes again, because he did, and because honesty is all he has to offer John in the midst of all of this. 

“It’s fine,” he says. “Are you? Okay?” John shrugs and they don’t speak, but John puts his hand on Sherlock’s shin through the duvet. 

“I dreamt about Magnussen,” John murmurs a little later, and Sherlock sits up to get a better look of him. 

“Yeah?”

“To be honest I don’t think I knew how much you cared, before that,” John continues. Sherlock’s chest widens and clenches with it. 

“To be fair, neither did I,” he says, honest again, and John laughs and takes Sherlock’s hand.

“Is this okay?” he asks, and Sherlock nods, and they sit and talk on Sherlock’s bed in the dead of night with their hands intertwined and it feels like this is what they should always do. When John falls asleep in Sherlock’s bed, Sherlock doesn’t mind, and when he’s still there the next morning, Sherlock doesn’t really mind either. 

\--

They go to a café one late afternoon for a case, and when they reach the counter the woman behind it gives John a one-over, wets her lips, and smirks as she tells him a cheesy joke. Sherlock pretends that his whole body doesn’t freeze with the idea of it, of John going off with someone else again because he was too slow, and too not enough. 

But contrary to usual John only smiles tightly, and then he grabs onto the hem of Sherlock’s coat-sleeve, and takes his coffee with a polite “Thank you.” Their skin isn’t even touching, but the gesture is clear. 

“You’re my home,” John explains when they sit down, and Sherlock feels out of breath and dizzy, and when John lets him take his hand under the table, he feels like he can see a future worth living somewhere out the corner of his eye. 

\--

They share a bed for sleeping sometimes, and sometimes they don’t, but most of the time they don’t talk about it. 

One day, in spring, Sherlock is doing an experiment in the kitchen on an uneventful Saturday, and John is sitting in the living room in his armchair reading a book, when he calls, “Sherlock?”

“Yeah?” Sherlock says, still engrossed in what he’s doing. 

“Would it be weird if I kissed you?” John asks, and for a moment Sherlock doesn’t register because it is so far from what he’d imagined it’d be, but then he looks up and finds John smiling at him, awaiting. 

“Now?” he ends up simply asking, and the smile on John’s lips broaden. 

“Or just in general,” he says. 

“Maybe,” he says, and they’re discussing this like it’s a perfectly casual thing. “But good, too. I think the good would outweigh the weird.”

“Hm,” John says, still in the chair, like he ponders it. “And what would happen to us, do you think?” Sherlock dips his head and tries to control his smile, because this is so strange and so happening and, really, so them. 

“I think I’d call this ‘us’ more often, and maybe we’d wear less clothes. Otherwise, I think we’d be pretty similar.”

John smiles in the same way that Sherlock did just before, and their eyes meet, and they chuckle. 

“And could you live with that?” John asks.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Sherlock says, and John snorts, before he gets up and walks over to stand besides Sherlock’s chair. John kisses him, and it’s soft and warm and sweet, before it is hungry and desperate and leading them down to the bedroom, and then it is filled with laughter and jokes and it’s pretty much perfect. 

“I love you, you know,” John says afterwards, when he’s kicking Sherlock’s ankle with his foot, kissing his earlobe, and touching his collarbone. 

“I know. Thank you, though,” Sherlock replies, and if they end up in each other’s space again, neither of them really mind.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this, please shoot me a comment and say so, because it makes me overly joyed, like cat-stickers
> 
> I'm on Tumblr at [tenderlock](http://tenderlock.tumblr.com)if you want to come say hi  
> 


End file.
